craftgrrl | engagement party invites!

its overcast and rainy outside and my fiance is working so i had to find something to entertain myself with. i figured i would start working on our engagement party invites. my sister is technically the host of the party, but shes not really crafty this way and i really wanted to work on these.

these are the invites i bought at a paper store (the colour is a little off). we cant afford to buy expensive invites through a wedding store or anything. even with my sister and my parents helping out with this party, we dont have much of a budget.
(click pics to enlarge)

pink is my favourite colour and i absolutely love when it is paired with orange. these are cute, but kinda boring. just your basic hawaiian party invites that come with plain white envelopes. i wanted something a little funkier. something special and personal. in other words, they needed some work. this isnt just some everyday luau party...its our engagement party! (yes, i know im a dork.)

i have been saving invite ideas ever since we set a wedding date. i plan on making our own wedding invites. i remembered i thought these ones were really cute, but not quite my style for a wedding.

(i think these were originally posted in an lj community, but i dont remember whose they are.)

i somehow wanted to incorporate this style into our invites. i dont really have money right now to spend on craft stuff and there are no good craft stores in this town. the closest joanns is about an hour away. so i dug through my craft stuff and found some coloured paper sacks. the fancy ones from hallmark that are about the size of lunch bags.

i cut out the front and backs of the orange and pink bags making two separate pieces per bag and left the scraps.

i took one piece of the paper i cut out of a bag, punched some wholes in it and wrapped it around an invite. then i took some black ribbon i had in one of my craft drawers and laced the invite up. this is what they look like so far. some will have pink wrappers and some will have orange.

this is the first complete one. its a bit rough on the edges, but the rest will look nicer.

you can slide the invite out through the top or the bottom of the wrap, or you can just unlace it. im really happy with these so far. i still might change them a bit more, but ill have to wait and see. i have an idea using a vellum overlay over part of the actual invite, but im not sure if ill do it or not.